Perception

The Digital Marketplace Forum was held yesterday, and it’s probably the first and only event I’ll be involved in during this internship. The two weeks prior was spent preparing for the event, and for my part I was handling mostly the administrative tasks. It was slightly similar to what I had to do for GIC’s inaugural staff conference two years back, although I probably had a more involved role this time.

I was tasked to design a flyer for the event, and after initial experiments with different ideas I was instructed to follow the corporate guidelines for IDA and the Digital Media & Entertainment department, including the colours and fonts used. This actually made it a lot easier, although perhaps slightly less satisfying to do. The final result can be found here and I think the best word to describe the result would be ‘normal’.

Preparing the information kits for the attendees was taxing to a certain extent, and manually putting together two hundred sets was menial work for more than half a day. The amount of paper that was printed for an event that ultimately had just over a hundred attendees is quite staggering, but thankfully I survived without a single paper cut. Only about three-quarters of these kits were given out though, so the rest had to be taken apart after the event.

I was also in charge of tracking the attendees list and handling the RSVP emails and phone calls, which got a bit hectic closer to the date of the event. I had to cold call quite a number of people too, and what I learnt from this is that I’m not really good at it. Over two hundred people were invited but only half managed to attend, and I must add that I’m quite pleased I didn’t screw up the attendees list in the end.

The day itself went well, with nothing going wrong except a lot of wasted, good food. I was manning the registration desk for almost the entire time and didn’t get to sit-in for any of the speeches nor the breakout sessions, so that was quite unfortunate. In any case, I think the forum was quite a success for the department, and in a larger context it was a step in the right direction for Singapore in her approach towards setting up a hub for digital media here.

The event is easily the highlight of my internship so far, and it’s definitely satisfying to see the hard work pay off. The rest of the internship will probably center around some research I’m doing on digital advertising and 3D TV trends, although I’ll leave that for a later post.